"The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain." (Hadamard)

10/03/2009

Bubblepiercing

The idea of biological and mental life defined as anti-entropic process makes me think about how an associated entropic drift pervading everydaylife, as enclosure in mental, emotional, social bubbles, shielding one from further development, looks like. People turning into museums of forgotten and betrayed dreams. The main force pulling one inside such bubbles may be that the desire to learn and experience something new and creative vanishes. There was a moving film by Jim Jarmusch on that a few years ago, where the main character - a man who appears to be permanently detached, mentally retired - is pushed into visiting his former girlfriends. Enclosed in fixed ways of life, they reject any impulse from outside and soon one gets a feeling of complete absurdity and sadness about all that loss of vitality. At the end one notices that the main character is the only person in the film mentally really alife, his absentmindedness being just his refusal to settle in some mental or biographical mousetrap. But his unability to become creative and connect with others makes him guilty of the broken lives of his former girlfriends and turns the film into a critique of the american society - finally prepared to become active, only suburb anonymity is in sight. A mousetrap of collossal extension was the former GDR, whose opening was celebrated today. The deformations of personalities and private lifes inside it then are described in this excellent film, Timothy G. Ash tells how that ended.

There is a brilliant and funny scifi story about a group of scientists fighting against the entropic forces, which materialize in strange incidents. The hero of this group is Vecherovsky, a mathematician modeled after a friend of the authors. The astronomer of the book gives up the fight.. "gathers his work and, like the others, decides to take it to Vecherovsky. The latter will apparently assume the burden of this impossible diversity of disciplinary work, along with his own project. Entering Vecherovsky's apartment, Malianov finds the usually neat scientist singed and burned, his furnishings in shambles; like Luther before him, he has struggled with this new homeostatic "devil." His decision is to take these scientific papers to distant Pamir, to seek in exile to give new (if strange) order to their apparent chaos. It is Malianov who perceives that "a line of fire and brimstone that could never be crossed was drawn between Vecherovsky and me".(source) Let's try not to become such a spineless petty-bourgeois, perhaps the line looks more frightening than it really is? This small town in south france shows the possibility to fight the evil and sets a standard.